The sight of New Zealand and South Africa battling it out for world supremacy - albeit in Paris rather than in the usual surrounds of Loftus Versfeld or Eden Park - will carry a great deal of historical resonance.
For most of the 20th century, the winner of the intermittent series' between the pair was regarded as the de-facto world champion. Down south, at any rate.
"Back in the amateur era, it was kind of like a heavyweight boxing title," says New Zealand rugby writer Jamie Wall.
"Whoever won those series between the All Blacks and the Springboks was unofficially the world champions. So it's quite a nice bit of symmetry that they meet again in the World Cup final. Because when they used to meet in the old days, it was seen as that - bear in mind this is a very New Zealand-South Africa-centric view.
"For us as New Zealanders, it's the most important opponent we have. It's the one game where you really don't know what's going to happen. You can take the the All Blacks lead-in form and the Springboks lead-in form and it doesn't really matter because they turn into different teams when they play each other."
Rugby fans who grew up in the 1980s and 90s may have been inclined to think of New Zealand-Australia as the primary rivalry in the southern hemisphere, due to geographic proximity and the latter's uncommon strength at the time.
But the Wallabies as a powerful outfit is a relatively modern phenomenon. [Prior to the 1980s, Ireland - "not regarded as a threat" by either the All Blacks or the Boks - had a positive head-to-head record against Australia, which tells us enough.]
It was New Zealand-South Africa that was the grudge match and the blue riband fixture.
Several dates stick in the mind, South Africa's win in New Zealand in 1937, the 1981 tour which sparked a near civil war in Kiwi society, the so-called Afrikaners' Last Stand of 1992 and the South Africa's perfect day in 1995.
Early days: Springboks have the edge
New Zealand's exalted status in rugby has been taken as read for the past half century. The default best team in the world.
However, until the mid-70s, the All Blacks were regarded as at best neck-and-neck with the Springboks. Between 1921 and 1981, they met in 10 test series, South Africa winning five, New Zealand winning three, with the first two being drawn.
"If you go right back, the Springboks were definitely the better team for the first 50 years or so. It took until 1956 for the All Blacks to beat them in a series," observes Wall, who is the author of the definitive history of the rivalry, 'The One Hundred Years War: All Blacks v Springboks'.
Victory tended to go to the home side, often controversially so. The careful protocols of the professional era were a long way away yet and the phrase 'home town ref' carried a more literal meaning in those days.
The host nation would in fact provide the ref, a charmingly quaint arrangement.
In the NZ-produced documentary, 'A Political Game - A story of rugby and apartheid', New Zealanders' grievances about South African referees are a consistent motif.
Of the 1960 tour, in which the Boks squeezed home 2-1, New Zealand historian Ron Palenski remarked: "It was a series that could have been won. We had a good team. They had referees."
The South Africans had their own complaints about the NZ refs in the 1956 tour, which saw the tourists' first series loss to the All Blacks, and their first series loss of any sort since losing to the 'British Isles' in 1896.
"People told us that long before we arrived in New Zealand, the referees, the coaching fraternity, they were planning to beat us," intoned gravel-voiced Springbok lock Johan Claassen.
New Zealand's 1976 tour of South Africa - which proceeded despite increasingly loud protests - was viewed as the series where the local refs really took the proverbial, with even the home fans conceding that Bruce Robertson was denied an obvious penalty try late in the fourth test.
1981: "We may be taking this game too seriously"
The horrific racial policy of South Africa's Nationalist government had reared its head on previous tours and was becoming increasingly offensive to liberal opinion in New Zealand from the 1960s onwards.
As elsewhere, the rugby authorities continued to plough ahead.
In 1960, the New Zealand Rugby Union had excluded their own Maori contingent at the behest of the South African ruling party. During the '65 series in NZ, South Africa's notorious prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd - the 'architect of apartheid' - slammed the door on the prospect of Maori players being allowed into South Africa for the proposed tour of 1967, despite the liberalising tendencies of SA rugby chief Danie Craven.
In 1969, the pressure group 'Halt All Racist Tours' was founded in New Zealand, campaigning for a complete boycott of all sporting contact with South Africa. In 1973, Labour prime minister Norman Kirk intervened to ban the Springboks from touring New Zealand.
By the early 80s, the country had become a fully-fledged pariah on the world stage.
It didn't stop Ireland touring South Africa in 1981, against the wishes of the Irish government. That story is recounted in David Coughlan's excellent RTÉ Doc on One production, Crossing the Line.
Needless to say, it caused a storm of controversy. Civil servants on the Irish team were denied leave to participate. Gerry McLoughlin and John Robbie lost their jobs after agreeing to travel - the latter staying around to improbably become South Africa's answer to Joe Duffy over the subsequent decade. Aer Lingus refused to handle the booking, meaning the players had to wear their civilian gear at Dublin airport before changing into their blazers in Heathrow. RTÉ decided not to cover the Tour beyond a cursory announcement of the results on radio. Four players - Hugo MacNeill, Tony Ward, Donal Spring and Moss Keane - refused to tour on moral grounds.
That tour at least went on out of the sight of the Irish public. The controversy and upheaval in New Zealand a couple of months later was of a different order.
The country had long been split on the matter. New Zealand's loud-mouthed populist prime minister Rob Muldoon had won the 1975 election, having made clear in the campaign that he wouldn't stand in the way of a South African tour.
The fateful '81 tour sparked a wave of protests, riots and displays of police brutality which were entirely alien in New Zealand's relatively placid society.
"It was definitely the biggest display of civil disobedience in New Zealand in the last 50 years," says Wall.
"A very, very organised protest movement sprang up in New Zealand. And because it was a tour, you knew where the games were going to be. Special police squads were set up to counter the protests.
"It resulted in hundreds of arrests. People getting beaten up by police. Some really shocking footage.
"Nothing had really ever been seen like that in New Zealand before - it's a pretty peaceful country, at least in the 20th century - and nothing has really been seen like it since."
The second match of the tour in Hamilton against Waikato had to be cancelled as protestors overwhelmed the slack security offered by a simple picket fence and invaded the pitch, linking arms and refusing to budge. When word came through via the tannoy, the paying spectators let out a howl of fury.
It all culminated in the extraordinary and borderline surreal scenes witnessed in the third and decisive test in Eden Park on 12 September.
While violent clashes between protestors and police raged outside the stadium, two left-wing activists, the appropriately named Marx Jones and his compadre Grant Cole, commandeered a plane and flew it around the stadium at a terrifyingly low height, while raining the pitch with flour bombs, smoke bombs and anti-apartheid leaflets. At one stage, Jones flew it lower than the height of the goalposts.
Incredibly, the game continued despite this. Watching the match on Youtube, one hears the growl of the plane's engines as it swoops [just] overhead, with flour frequently splatting on the turf. All Black prop Gary Knight was pelted on the head by one such missile.
In later years, Nelson Mandela would pay tribute to the efforts of the 1981 protesters, though daring pilot Jones wasn't inclined to bask in that acclaim from the now revered President. An uncompromising leftist, he later branded Mandela as "a western stooge" and "that a**hole" in the NZ Herald and labelled the ANC a "capitalist" outfit.
The rugby match went on as this re-enactment of Apocalypse Now played out above the players' heads. The drama on the pitch couldn't quite match the drama off it - though it almost did. With the series tied at 1-1, Springbok Ray Mordt scored two second half tries to tie the game at 22-22.
There was a sting in the tail. Such was the importance of the game, New Zealand took the novel decision to invite over a neutral referee - fancy that - in the shape of Wales' Clive Norling. Notwithstanding this, he still awarded a highly contentious penalty to the hosts deep in the injury-time, Allan Hewson nailing the kick to win the series for the All Blacks.
For all that it mattered. New Zealand society was scarred and shaken by the events of '81 and the South Africans were thoroughly frozen out for the next decade, save for a couple of widely condemned rebel tours.
"From a New Zealand point of view, and the obsession that we're famous for in rugby, you can't really sum it up more than the fact that there was a rugby game going on with a couple of guys in a plane flying lower than the goalposts, dropping s**t on the field and literally almost crashing into the grandstand every time they did it. And they just kept the game going.
"But that's how much that rivalry meant to people. That they were willing to sit there and potentially be killed to let this game continue.
"I think it was afterwards, when New Zealand walked away, it was a case of... maybe we're taking this a bit too seriously.
"And that's when South Africa entered into that period of isolation. We had 12 years to think about what we'd just done as a country."
1992: The Afrikaners' Last Stand
After their long exile, in which they missed the first two World Cups, South Africa were finally welcomed back into the international sporting community in 1992. Mandela had famously been released in February 1990, though it wasn't until March '92 that the country formally ditched apartheid in a 'Whites Only' referendum.
Naturally, their oldest rivals were earmarked as the opposition for their first game back in the fold. On 15 August 1992, South Africa hosted New Zealand in their first officially recognised game for 11 years.
The Springboks had a couple of survivors from the '81 tour in the shape of out-half Naas Botha and legendary centre Danie Gerber, both of whom had lost the better part of their international career to apartheid and who wouldn't play beyond that autumn.
South Africa's exile hadn't done wonders for their rugby and they shipped beatings at home to both New Zealand and the world champion Wallabies in successive weeks, subsequently losing to Will Carling's England in Twickenham the following November.
That was almost beside the point for the rugby hardcore in Eden Park, who had internal battles on their mind.
Division was still rife in the country and the future of the Springboks was uncertain. After 45 ANC supporters were massacred in June, there was talk of the sporting moratorium being reinstated. This was staved off on the promise that the old national anthem not be played and a minute silence take place for those killed.
The Afrikaner crowd defiantly thumbed their nose at these arrangements, using the minute silence to belt out Die Stem van Suid-Afrika. The old Union of South Africa flag was waved with abandon.
"Things hadn't really changed much in South African society," says Wall. "You need to have a generation pass before things are really going to change.
"If it was up to a lot of people in the ANC at the time, they would have banned rugby and gotten rid of the Springboks.
"The entire stand was white South Africans. And during the minute silence, they sung the national anthem that they thought was going to be gotten rid of.
"The whole game was a show of... 'this is who we are, we don't think anything should change.'
"I've talked to a couple of guys that played in that game. And they said it was unlike anything they've been a part of. Because they knew it wasn't really about the rugby match. It was about those people in the ground who were saying 'hey, we're still here, we're not going down without a fight.'
"That's why they call it the Afrikaners' Last Stand.
"It's crazy to think it went from that to the same stadium three years later, we had the Nelson Mandela moment."
1995: Glorious catharsis
The only previous World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand still remains probably the most famous game of rugby ever played.
Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon made sure of it, giving the filmic treatment to South Africa's unexpected World Cup win on home soil and Nelson Mandela's uniting of the country behind the Springboks banner.
With many ANC members hankering to see the sport banned altogether, Mandela skillfully alighted upon the team's potential as a unifying force. In the leader's mind, it would also represent a rapprochement with the chastened and wary white minority. Thus, we wound up with the remarkable scectacle of a black South African president arrived at the stadium in a Springbok jersey, while a stadium-full of white Afrikaner supporters chanted his name.
While not pegged as one of the favourites, South Africa had shaken off their post-exile sluggishness. Embracing their traditional, forward-based, kick-heavy gameplan, they beat an ageing Wallabies in the opening match and overcame France in a semi-waterlogged field in the semi-final in Durban.
"They caught up, basically," recalls Wall. "They looked at their squad, they said we don't have Jonah Lomu, we don't have these top players. We're going to play to our strengths. Which is why we got the final we did.
"It took me 20 years to watch it again! But it's actually not a bad game, for a game with no tries in it."
New Zealand, with the frightening Lomu announcing himself as the first superstar of the professional era, looked an infinitely superior outfit over the course of the competition, dismissing a Grand Slam-winning England with devastating relish in the semi-final.
But the favourites were shut out in the final, the game finishing 9-9 after 80 minutes, with Joel Stransky lamping over the winning drop goal in extra-time.
Afterwards, the legend grew that the New Zealand team had fallen victim to food poisoning on the week of the game. While, they were struck down, Wall says the consensus among the group was that there was no foul play involved.
"They definitely got sick. I've talked to half of the squad and the team doctor. And all of them, to a man, agree that they just got a bad batch of chicken.
"It was a buffet dinner. It had been undercooked and then sitting under some heat lamps for too long. They ate it, they all got sick.
"But by the time the game rolled around, they had all pretty much recovered. But it's just one of those stories that is just going to persist forever."
1996 and beyond - "Ho-hum, here we go again"
While they were stunned in '95 World Cup final, the All Blacks gained revenge in historic fashion the following year.
There were scenes of delirium at the final whistle in Pretoria in August '96, when the tourists clung on for a 33-26 win and a first ever series victory on South African soil.
"Hang on, New Zealand!" cried the Kiwi commentators, as they were camped on their line in the final seconds.
The relief was all the more acute given that it was already apparent that the days of large scale Tours were soon to pass into history.
The professional era - which formally began the previous autumn - created a new calendar and regular flow of games between New Zealand and South Africa.
However, the purists tend towards a 'less is more' view of the rivalry and felt there was a dreary monotony to the yearly Tri-Nations' battles.
"Aw, the Tri-Nations is a bit ho-hum, here we go again," sighed Palenski on the Apartheid documentary. "And I know it rates well on television..."
Many yearned for the big tours of yesteryear, with all their attendant romanticism and mystique.
Wall agrees that the rivalry probably lost something of its spark in the 2000s: "We wouldn't see them for decades and now all of a sudden in the late 90s, we weren't just playing them twice a year but we were also playing all their teams in Super Rugby.
"And I guess the mystique was gone. Because we knew who these guys were. I think there was a lot of games in the 2000-10 era that have just faded from memory. They still put on good games in that period but because they were playing so frequently... back in the Tour days, there was whole newspapers written about every single game they played."
In contrast to the amateur days of scattered, intermittent tours and charmingly biased refs, when South Africa held the edge, New Zealand have established a relative dominance in the rivalry in the modern era.
However, they are tied 3-3 in Rugby World Cups, with the deadlock set to be broken this weekend. Historic bragging rights are at stake in a match that harks back to the heavyweight bouts of old.
Watch New Zealand v South Africa in the Rugby World Cup final on Saturday from 7pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, follow a live blog on RTE.ie/Sport or the RTÉ News app
